July thickened down upon London. The society papers
announced that with the exception of the few unfortunate
gentlemen who were compelled to stay and look after their
constituents' interests, at Westminster, "everybody" had
gone out of town, and filled up yawning columns with
detailed information as to everybody's destination. To
an inexperienced eye, with the point of view of the top
of an Uxbridge Road omnibus for instance, it might not
appear that London had diminished more than the extent
of a few powdered footmen on carriage boxes; but the
census of the London world is after all not to be taken
from the top of an Uxbridge Road omnibus. London teemed
emptily, the tall houses in the narrow lanes of Mayfair
slept standing, the sunlight filtered through a depressing
haze and stood still in the streets for hours together.
In the Park the policemen wooed the nursery-maids free
from the embarrassing smiling scrutiny of people to whom
this serious preoccupation is a diversion. The main
thoroughfares were full of "summer sales," St. Paul's
echoed to admiring Transatlantic criticism, and the
Bloomsbury boarding-houses to voluble Transatlantic
complaint.
The Halifaxes were at Brighton, Lady Halifax giving
musical teas, Miss Halifax painting marine views in a
little book. Miss Halifax called them "impressions," and
always distributed them at the musical teas. The Cardiffs
had gone to Scotland for golf, and later on for grouse.
Janet was almost as expert on the links as her father,
and was on very familiar terms with a certain Highland
moor and one Donald Macleod. They had laid every compulsion
upon Elfrida to go with them, in vain; the girl's
sensitiveness on the point of money obligations was
intense, and Janet failed to measure it accurately when
she allowed herself to feel hurt that their relations
did not preclude the necessity for taking any thought as
to who paid. Elfrida staid, however, in her by-way of
Fleet Street, and did a little bit of excellent work for
the _Illustrated Age_ every day. If it had not been for
the editor-in-chief, Rattray would have extended her
scope on the paper; but the editor-in-chief said no, Miss
Bell was dangerous, there was no telling what she might
be up to if they gave her the reins. She went very well,
but she was all the better for the severest kind of a
bit. So Miss Bell wrote about colonial exhibitions and
popular spectacles, and country outings for babies of
the slums, and longed for a fairer field. As midsummer
came on there arrived a dearth in these objects of orthodox
interest, and Rattray told her she might submit "anything
on the nail" that occurred to her, in addition to such
work as the office could give her to do. Then, in spite
of the vigilance of the editor-in-chief, an odd
unconventional bit of writing crept now and then into
the _Age_--an interview with some eccentric notability
with the piquancy of a page from Gyp, a bit of pathos
picked out of the common, streets, a fragment of
character-drawing which smiled visibly and talked audibly.
Elfrida in her garret drew a joy from these things. She
cut them out and read them over and over again, and put
them sacredly away, with Nadie's letters and a manuscript
poem of a certain Bruynotin's, and a scrawl from one
Hakkoff, with a vigorous sketch of herself, from memory,
in pen and ink in the corner of the page, in the little
eastern-smelling wooden box which seemed to her to
represent the core of her existence. They quickened her
pulse, they gave her a curious uplifted happiness that
took absolutely no account of any other circumstance.
There were days when Mrs. Jordan had real twinges of
conscience about the quality of Miss Bell's steak. "But
there," Mrs. Jordan would soothe herself, "I might bring
her the best sulline, and she wouldn't know no difference."
In other practical respects the girl was equally
indifferent. Her clothes were shabby, and she did not
seem to think of replacing them; Mrs. Jordan made
preposterous charges for candles, and she paid them
without question. She tipped people who did little services
for her with a kind of royal delicacy; the girl who
scrubbed the landings worshipped her, and the boy who
came every day for her copy once brought her a resplendent
"button-hole" consisting of two pink rosebuds and a
scarlet geranium, tendering it with a shy lie to the
effect that he had found it in the street. She went alone
now and again to the opera, taking an obscure place, and
she lived a good deal among the foreign art exhibitions
of Bond Street. Once she bought an etching and brought
it home under her arm. That kept her poor for a month,
though she would have been less aware of it if she had
not, before the month was out, wanted to buy another. A
great Parisian actress had made her yearly visit to London
in June, and Elfrida conjuring with the name of the
_Illustrated Age_, won an appointment from her. The
artiste staid only a fortnight--she declared that one
half of an English audience came to see her because it
was proper and the other because it was sinful, and she
found it insupportable--and in that time she asked Elfrida
three times to pay her morning visits, when she appeared
in her dressing-gown, little unconventional visits "_pour
bavarder_." When Miss Bell lacked entertainment during the
weeks that followed she thought of these visits, and little
smiles chased each other round the corners of her mouth.
She wrote to Janet when she was in the mood--delicious
scraps of letters, broad-margined, fantastic, each, so
far as charm went, a little literary gem disguised in
wilfulness, in a picture, in a diamond-cut cynicism that
shone sharper and clearer for the "dainty affectation of
its setting." When she was not in the mood she did not
write at all. With an instinctive recognition of the
demands of any relation such as she felt her friendship
with Janet Cardiff to be, she simply refrained, from
imposing upon her anything that savored of dullness or
commonplaceness. So that sometimes she wrote three or
four times in a week and sometimes not at all for a
fortnight, sometimes covered pages and sometimes sent
three lines and a row of asterisks. There was a fancifulness
in the hour as well, that usually made itself felt all
through the letter--it was rainy twilight in her garret,
or a gray wideness was creeping up behind St Paul's,
which meant that it was morning. To what she herself was
actually doing, or to any material fact about her, they
made the very slightest reference. Janet, in Scotland,
perceived half of this, and felt aggrieved on the score
of the other half. She wished, more often than she said
she did, that Elfrida were a little more human, that she
had a more appreciative understanding of the warm value
of common every-day matters between people who were
interested in one another. The subtle imprisoned soul in
Elfrida's letters always spoke to hers, but Janet never
received so artistic a missive of three lines that she
did not wish it were longer, and she had no fund of
confidence to draw on to meet her friend's incomprehensible
spaces of silence. To cover her real soreness she scolded,
chaffed brusquely, affected lofty sarcasms.
"Twelve days ago," she wrote, "you mentioned casually
that you were threatened with pneumonia; your communication
of to-day you devote to proving that Hector Malot is a
carpenter. I agree with you with reservations, but the
sequence worries me. In the meantime have you had the
pneumonia?"
Her own letters were long and gossiping, full of the
scent of the heather and the eccentricities of Donald
Macleod; and she wrote them, regularly twice a week,
using rainy afternoons for the purpose and every inch of
the paper at her disposal. Elfrida put a very few of
them into the wooden box, just as she would have embalmed,
if she could, a very few of the half-hours they had spent
together.